


leave 'em laughing when you go

by aparticularbandit



Series: it's love's illusions i recall; i really don't know love at all [2]
Category: Jane the Virgin (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 09:48:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19972036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aparticularbandit/pseuds/aparticularbandit
Summary: i don't have a summary for this one either.





	leave 'em laughing when you go

she was watching the day her line went flat.

it was, of course, her fault. she’d grown tired – not of watching, never of watching – but of this unnamable, suppressive feeling that sat thicker and thicker in the core of her chest the longer it went on. _guilt_ , maybe, someone might call it. _shame_. _regret_. she’d never had a sense of any of these to know what to call them – she may have _said_ she regretted killing luisa’s father, but what she’d really regretted was causing luisa’s pain, and how could she really regret _any_ of that when it had gone according to plan and luisa was right there with her? she hadn’t lied, of course, because she never _lied_ to luisa – not any more than she had to, for her protection – but it was more of a theoretical regret. an abstract. something she knew she _should_ feel and _should_ say and if she thought about it that was surely the _right_ reaction, even if the feeling wasn’t truly there at all.

is this sinking feeling of dread what normal people feel? this sort of molasses growing bigger in her until it encompassed her entire self with this feeling – not of doing something wrong, but of something _being_ wrong and that something being _her_ – growing until it cut off her voice, stilled her hands, refused to let her do anything but **watch**?

is this the weight people feel when their actions cause someone else pain? when someone dies because of them? it’s almost worse than the agonizing but much sharper ache of luisa’s kidnapping – _that_ , at least, she could do something about, _and she did_ , with the bitter taste of olives and salt on her lips when her stepmother and her son finally paid for that mistake. but she can’t think around this. it just is.

luisa wasn’t supposed to be there at all.

luisa wasn’t supposed to be _anywhere_ at all. not anymore. she’d chosen her path. it hadn’t included her. like the shock of ice hitting your back on a hot summer’s day or the tip of your tongue when you drink hot chocolate too fast when its freezing outside and it burns you, numbs you, and you feel the prickles of it as you eat for the rest of the day. you heal. your tongue is designed to do that. and, eventually, you do it again.

the associate in question had been the last of the women surgically altered to appear identical to her – the one, perhaps, who had been the closest representation because even their blood type was the same. breaking into hospitals was easy – she’d done it before – and with them already believing she was on the bed in the room, she’d only needed to feed something into the woman’s iv to make her move on. dead women tell no tales.

but luisa had been there and it felt like burning her tongue again and instead of doing the job she’d gone to do with a surgical mask over her _other_ mask – masks on masks on masks with no real way of getting to the bottom, although luisa had _tried_ – she’d been so _close_ —

instead of doing what she came there to do, she watched.

she had to.

* * *

luisa kept coming at night and she followed.

not _followed_. that sounds like she was stalking her, watching her, looking for a way to kidnap her or hurt her again, when it was less that and more an idle – no, not idle, the curiosity was so loud she thought maybe this is what cats felt like when it killed them – and she wonders if there would be any satisfaction warm enough to bring her back from the edge of that precipice. she thinks not.

she pays the nurse and steps into the role. she learns how to clean a body that looks like hers but isn’t, learns how to make sure that body is moved so that there are no bed sores, learns how to watch the heart rate and brain activity and look for any changes so she can tell luisa with no hint of irony in her voice that there is no change. and there isn’t – the woman in the bed dangles on a wire and luisa keeps coming and she keeps watching.

eventually, _eventually_ , luisa begins to talk and it’s not the same kind of talk that they’d had before. maybe it’s because this time she doesn’t interrupt – maybe it’s because even if she wanted to, this time she _can’t_ – and she sits just outside the room’s open door and looks in through the thick pane of glass and listens to the whispered, reverent hush of her love’s voice telling her that she never loved her.

the accusation doesn’t hurt. there have been too many people throughout her life telling her that she didn’t – that she _couldn’t_ – and she’s never been able to understand quite what they meant. what is love? it’s not whatever this crawling, biting feeling is – that’s a much too negative feeling and love is supposed to be cloyingly sweet, like honeycomb stolen from a bee’s hive without being stung or like doughnuts covered with powdered sugar, like sugar dissolving on your tongue, so much of it that your teeth begin to ache with the taste of it. love, like that, it tastes so good and yet it corrodes the enamel, strips you bare, leaves the nerves open until even the sweetness itself is an ever present ache.

you rot from such sweetness.

love is not that sweetness, not for her. luisa herself is, and she was meant to devour her whole, even if her belly cried with the excess of her, even if all she did was leave her sick.

her stomach twists, listening, and that feeling never goes away.

* * *

days turn to months and when luisa tells her that she’s moving the body to another facility she follows, too. all she needs is another mask, another name, another face, and she can continue to do what she feels she’s been doing for all of her life – or at least, all of it that mattered – not hope for an entrance, because that door was long ago shut to her, but try to understand what she’d done to make it lock so suddenly, the knob torn from its hold, the doorway covered with brick walls so thick her nails can’t scratch through. she’d tried – it feels like scraping her nails on a chalkboard, numb and crusty and dry.

sometimes she asks the body why she continues to hang on.

the body never answers.

she thinks, briefly, that if luisa were there for her, she might hang on, too.

* * *

she chooses the last time. there is too much weight in this place, too much death hanging in her throat like a noose she’s swallowed instead of wrapping it around her neck, and she thinks if she is tired of this, luisa must be, too, and yet luisa keeps coming back and keeps coming back and she thinks, maybe, luisa will never let her go just like _she_ never let her go, not really, and she makes the choice.

luisa’s punctual.

she gives the body something.

every now and again, before, when she’d handled the body and luisa had helped there’d been little glances, small touches. she’d allowed herself, once, to put her hand between luisa’s shoulder blades, the thin rose gold ring on her finger as always, in some sort of attempt to comfort. mostly she’d just wanted to touch her again.

one more time.

she thought, maybe, that luisa might cry because luisa was so good at crying. she thought, maybe, that she might be able to hold her close one last time. she thought, maybe, that they’d be able to comfort each other as she died, even if luisa didn’t know that’s what was happening.

but luisa was calm. no tears. she made arrangements and thanked her for taking such good care of the body and left.

she looked too long into the abyss and now the abyss was staring back at her and it wasn’t the star-studded sky she’d grown accustomed to seeing but instead the cold of zero gravity clawing at her ankles and dragging her into a ceaseless void. the mask felt too tight against her skin, tighter by the surgical mask she’d worn, and there must have been something between her hazel-eyed contact scratching at her because everything was pins and needles and too much air that she couldn’t breathe.

she watched as she left with hands clenched into fists and nails piercing the skin of her palms and she will wear little moon-shaped scars there for the rest of her life even if she couldn’t see them, picking open the scabs again and again and thinking that might get the infection out but the pus will only grow and grow until she’s nothing else.

* * *

sometimes she visited her own grave.

she watched luisa too closely not to know.

sometimes she came empty handed just to brush her fingertips across the front of her tomb, leaving no fingerprints because the workers made sure it’s clean, leaving no flowers because no one cared about mia and the only ones who knew who was really in that tomb were luisa and herself.

strike that.

the only one who knew who was really in that tomb was herself.

and even then, if asked, she wasn’t sure what she would say. rose solano lay in that casket just as much as the body who wore her face. it died when the last bits of the mask did, and the red strings tying it on had always been wrapped in luisa’s fingers.

**Author's Note:**

> even when i was writing /the day her line went flat/, rose was intended to be the nurse - but it felt wrong to tack that on at the end.
> 
> in the same way, there was a bit i wanted to do in this one, to finish it, but it feels wrong to tack it on to the end of this one, too.
> 
> so. a trilogy of one-shots. still debating the ending of the third one, but it's already roughed out.


End file.
